Project Background

With the 2015 Paris agreement, the international community agreed to limit the rise in global temperature to below 2˚C. Roughly 30% of Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris agreement include land-based mitigation technologies and practices, that involve existing and novel practices in agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors, and negative emissions technologies¹. While these technologies have a key role in the global efforts to meet the Paris Agreement goals and are also relevant for the Sustainable Development Goals, such as food security, sustainable use of land and water resources, and biodiversity, they require further research and more scientific understanding.

Land use and agricultural management is strongly linked to the challenges and potential solutions for climate change². Research proposed a number of management options that can significantly contribute to not only soil organic carbon accumulation and reduction of soil greenhouse gas emissions from cropping systems, but also closed up nutrient cycling and reduction of nutrients applications, such as more efficient use of fertilizers, organic farming, reduced tillage intensity or no-tillage, crop residue retention, cover cropping, improved water and rice management. However, there are substantial uncertainties in how the mitigation potential of these practices varies between individual cropping systems, pedo-climatic conditions, historical land use and management across Europe³. Furthermore, the impacts associated with the production of agricultural inputs and farm operations linked to these management practices need to be considered in the quantification of greenhouse gas mitigation potentials. Ambitious mitigation scenarios require a large-scale implementation of cost-effective land-based mitigation technologies. Previous research on European cropping systems has been largely designed to investigate the influence of a range of agricultural management practices on agronomic performance, soil organic carbon, stocks of nutrients and soil fertility. However, most of these studies have been undertaken at the short-term (e.g., < 5 years) and potential trade-off between soil organic carbon changes, nutrient cycling and yield have not been considered. In addition, relatively little is known about the effects on greenhouse gas emissions, economic performance and social constraints of a large-scale adoption of alternative management practices in main European cropping systems.

The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land⁴ considers the sustainable use and management of land vital for designing effective agricultural mitigation strategies as well as for maintaining land productivity (i.e., food security) and biodiversity and for preventing land degradation. Long-term sustainability of the land-based mitigation technologies and practices therefore requires assessment across all sustainability pillars, although there are challenges to link specific high-resolution biophysical data and information at the local level directly to the social and economic assessment at the regional or national level. Therefore, a holistic, integrated assessment approach that links biophysical indicators informed by local long-term experimental data, data extracted from national databases and stakeholder knowledge (reflecting the socio-economic contexts) into broader indicator sets at resolution that allows for generalisability, are required.